The conceptual model by De Wet and Hubert (1989) for what Scott's Bay on the Bay of Fundy looked like 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth...
An Amethyst filled fossilized log. Sarah claimed she saw Amethyst while there, and I told her I was skeptical at the time. Not that I know very much about hard core geology, but I just didn't think you would see a mineral that is typically considering an intrusive igneous rock emplaced within a limestone (sedimentary) rock. It turns out you can have both forming side by side at the same time... (picture from De Wet and Hubert, 1989)
That's a geologic map of Nova Scotia, a province of eastern Canada on the Atlantic Ocean. The arrow points the field site on the bay of Fundy dubbed "Scott's Bay". We went there over Christmas vacation with my sister and her family. There we discovered some of the weirdest rocks I've ever seen!
These layers of rock flow like icing through chunks of limestone.
Sarah pointing to the flowing rock layers of deposited silica chert in between chunks of consolidated carbonate mud.
Some of the features out here looked volcanic. Although I wasn't willing to admit it to my brother-in-law at the time, it turns out there was basaltic volcanic rock here (De Wet and Hubert, 1989).
I believe these are stromatolites, piles of fossilized algae, more resistant to weathering the surrounding limestone matrix.
The really high 15 m tides at the bay of fundy allows a unique view of rocks that are being actively weathered by water.
All that red rock coating is chert, a silica-rich rock, deposited by silica-rich hydrothermal springs bubbling up through the carbonate mud of a shallow lake during the Jurassic period. I have never seen so much chert anywhere before. Apparently there are also fossilized logs which fell over and were buried in carbonate mud, and then later filled with Amethyst (a type of quartz which is a silicate rock).
A close up of the stromatolites.
This was the funniest and most humbling part of the day. I was trying to climb down this ice flow that my sister hopped off and landed on ice holding two toddlers.Birnery De Wet, C. C., Hubert, J. F. 1989. The Scots Bay formation, Nova Scotia, Canada, a Jurassic carbonate lake with Silica-rich hydrothermal springs. Sedimentology Vol. 36, 857-873.
